Three Musketeers at work for Kotak

By
, agencyfaqs! | In | July 20, 2004

Kotak Mahindra Mutual Fund has brought in the dog-cat-mouse troika for its advertising campaign for the latest product - a fund of funds

It's a universal law that dogs, cats and mice just don't get along. They are disparate entities and are perpetually in battle-gear. Even in the few Tom & Jerry episodes, where the two are friends, the bully bull & #BANNER1 & # dog has been left out.

By some quirk of fate, the natural foes have, of late, turned into allies - all for a mango.

Does the plot sound familiar now? The currently on-air Kotak Mahindra Mutual Fund television commercial has brought in the dog-cat-mouse troika for its advertising campaign for the latest product - a fund of funds.

The concept of a fund of funds (FoF) is new in the Indian financial markets. A FoF is a mutual fund scheme which invests its corpus in the units of other mutual funds', and does not directly invest in equity or debt instruments. Essentially, it is a product which supposedly gives investors decent returns with lesser risks.

When agencyfaqs! caught up with Kotak Mahindra's Prakash Dalal and quizzed him about the commercial, he said, "Yes, the dog-cat-mouse analogy was used to define that they are very different entities, who are constantly at loggerheads with each other. Yet, when it came to plucking the mango, they forgot their differences and became a single team."

"Similarly, while different mutual funds are constantly trying to out-perform each other and often failing in their primary objective to make the investor happy, a fund of funds invests in selected mutual fund schemes and gives the best returns to the investor."

Dalal, who is in charge of marketing the FoF, added, "We wanted to break the clutter in the market, and bring out a highly creative campaign which will arouse the curiosity of the prospective investors."

O&M, Mumbai executives, who have done the creatives for the campaign, said the challenge was to bring out the concept of "many mutual funds in one mutual fund". Apart from the TV commercial, the creative team has also worked on two still adverts. One featured the trio winning a race in a tri-cycle, while in the other, the new three Musketeers are putting a flag on a hill.

Speaking of promotions, Kotak Mahindra executives said that the usage of three mascots are not limited to hoardings or TV commercials alone. "We are using them in our promotional leaflets and banners as well. We have passed these on to the distributors and have used these extensively on the 28 roadshows that we undertook for marketing. In fact, we will continue to use these mascots in future, even after the initial public offer closes," Dalal explained.